Twelve

Detective Petrie was in his office when I showed up at police headquarters.

“Ah, Mr. Sears, come in,” he said.

We shook hands and he indicated a chair. “Please, have a seat.”

I did. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“No problem at all,” Petrie said. “I often think of Jason.”

Jason passed like a ghost through my mind, an image of him standing at the edge of the water, poised beside that ear-shaped stone, the air around him electric with voices. But even as he remained at his lonely station, he seemed to fade, so that in my last vision he was eerily translucent, his body undulating with softly lapping waves, already turning into water.

“I remember your sister, too,” Petrie added. “She took it very hard.”

“Yes, she did.”

“I hope she’s been able to go on.”

“I’m afraid she hasn’t,” I told him.

“Really,” Petrie said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I said nothing, but merely stared at him, amazed that it had actually reached this point, that I was here, in a police detective’s office because Diana would not accept Jason’s death, and that this refusal had worked like a suddenly shifted gear within her mind, edging out reason and replacing it with something whose exact nature I was still unable to determine.

“I don’t know if you can help me,” I said. “But I couldn’t think of anyone else I could go to.”

Petrie nodded, but said nothing, and I saw that he was a man used to waiting for tales to unfold, knew that they did so in fits and starts, that some things were too fearful to face head-on.

“I’ll help in any way I can,” he said. He waited for me to begin. When I didn’t, he said, “On the phone you mentioned that you had questions about Jason’s death.”

“Yes.”

“What questions?”

“I was wondering if you ever found any reason to suspect .  .  .” I stopped, because the final two words struck me as both formal and ludicrously theatrical. “Foul play.”

Petrie didn’t look at all surprised by the question, though I couldn’t tell if it was because he’d earlier suspected foul play himself or was simply accustomed to other people suspecting it.

“Foul play?” he asked.

“I know the court declared Jason’s death an accident, but I was wondering if you had any other thoughts about it.”

“Thoughts?” Petrie asked tentatively.

“Well, you carried out an investigation, didn’t you?”

“We always do in a case like this. A child. Drowned. At the very least, we have an untimely death. So, of course, we look into it.”

“So, you looked for evidence that maybe Jason’s death wasn’t an accident?”

Petrie leaned forward. “Why these particular questions, Mr. Sears?”

“I think my sister believes that Jason was murdered,” I told him flatly.

“By whom?”

“Her husband, Mark.”

Petrie’s eyes darkened just a shade. “That’s a very serious charge.”

“I know.”

For the first time Petrie appeared actually to address the issue seriously. “Murder,” he said. “If we suspected that, or even if we didn’t, we’d still be aware of red flags.”

“Evidence for suspicion,” I said, quoting my sister. “Like what?”

“Like signs of prior abuse,” Petrie answered. “If we saw a child with scars or burn marks, we’d check the medical records, look into the past.” He offered a professional smile, a stage gesture, nothing more, utterly neutral, and which he withdrew almost instantly. “But of course, we look at the present situation, too,” he added. His tone now sounded more like a recitation, so that I knew he’d gone over all these things before, laid it out for the many suspicious relatives or friends who’d come to him as I had, with dreadful possibilities in their minds. I could almost hear the conclusion upon which he was closing in. And so, you see, there is no evidence of .  .  . foul play.

“In a case of drowning, for example, we look for any sign of force,” Petrie went on. “Bruises, of course. And ligature marks. In this business you learn that some people just aren’t very smart. They assume that death by strangulation resembles death by drowning, for example, and so they try to make it look like a drowning. They take a dead body to a river or a pond and toss it in. It’s crazy, but they do it. But when people drown, they have water in their lungs. If they’re dead before they go into the water, there won’t be much water in their lungs because they weren’t breathing when they were put into the water. It’s as simple as that.” He considered what he’d just said, then amended it. “There is such a thing as ‘dry drowning,’ of course. It happens when people panic and simply stop breathing. The lungs shut down. They drown, but there’s very little water in their lungs.”

“Was there water in Jason’s lungs?” I asked.

“Jason’s lungs were full of water,” Petrie answered.

“So there’s no doubt that he was alive when he went into the water?”

“No doubt at all,” Petrie said. “And there were no signs of anything unusual. None of the things I mentioned. Bruises. Ligature marks. His body was perfect. You saw that yourself.”

“I only saw his face,” I said.

Petrie nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said. “But your sister saw it.”

“What?”

“She wanted to see Jason,” Petrie told me. “She called just before the autopsy. She said she wanted to see him before it was done. And of course, we permitted her to do that.”

“Just her? She came alone?”

“Yes.”

“When did she come?”

Petrie’s eyes rolled up slightly, held a moment, then returned to me. “That would have been Saturday. The day after Jason died. The body was already on the table, ready for autopsy. It was covered, of course, but she pulled back the sheet.” He hesitated, as if unsure whether he should say more. Then he added, “All the way down. From head to foot.”

I could feel myself hovering over the scene, a motionless presence, bodiless as a miasma, an invisible eye, peering down to where Diana stood beside the stainless steel table, Jason’s naked body bathed in the bright light of the autopsy room.

“It seemed strange to me,” Petrie said. “The way she studied him.”

“Studied?”

“I was just off to the side, but I could see that she was looking up and down the full length of his body.” He stopped, the import of that earlier insight only now sinking in. “I got the feeling she was looking for something.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because of how methodical it all was,” Petrie answered. “She didn’t hold him in her arms or anything like that. But she took his hands, one at a time, and looked at them very closely. Especially the palms.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked.

“It was like she’d read a bit about forensic pathology,” Petrie answered. “Knew the way it was done, what the pathologist looked for. Defensive wounds, for example. Or puncture marks from a needle. She asked us to turn Jason over, so we did. On his stomach. She bent down the way she had before and looked at him very closely.”

“Did she find anything?”

“No,” Petrie answered. “At least nothing she mentioned. When she was done, she took the sheet and covered the body. Then she turned and walked out of the room.” He shrugged. “I followed her out to her car. I was afraid she might break down. You know, the way she did after you told her that we’d found Jason in the pond.”

It rang through my head again, raw, brutal, primitive, an animal wail.

“At the car, I asked if there was anything else I could do for her,” Petrie went on. “She said no.” He gazed at me intently. “You didn’t know about any of this?”

“No.”

“I have to tell you, it made me a little uneasy, the way she was asking about the investigation.”

Petrie’s expression gave only the tiniest hint that he saw just how forcefully his words had hit me. In the following silence, he said nothing, but only watched my face as the words sank deeper and deeper into me. And yet I knew he could see that I wanted to vanish, abruptly and without a trace, simply erase both myself and Diana from his mind. I’d come to find out if he’d ever been suspicious of Mark, and discovered that he’d been suspicious of Diana instead.

Petrie sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s in the official playbook, Mr. Sears, the rules of investigation. When a wife disappears, you take a good look at the husband. Scott Peterson, you know? And when a child dies, you take a close look at the mother. Andrea Yates, for example.”

“But Diana wasn’t even at home when Jason drowned.”

“So she said.”

“And Mark backed her up.”

“Husbands defend wives.”

“You had no reason to suspect Diana,” I said. “We had knowledge of her past,” Petrie said. “Or at least I did.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I waited.

Petrie leaned forward. “Diana took your father back home and cared for him there, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“She left school,” he added. “Her senior year.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“She cared for him until he died.” Petrie’s tone suggested facts gathered by investigation, as if he’d gone through my sister’s private papers, looked among them for an incriminating receipt or letter. “Like Jason.”

“She devoted herself to Jason, yes,” I said. “In the same way, I mean.”

“That’s a lot of work, caring for a boy like that,” Petrie said. “Or caring for an old man. Same thing, really. A person can become clinically depressed in a situation like that. I’ve seen it happen a few times. Depressed and desperate.”

“You thought Diana was depressed?” I asked.

Petrie appeared genuinely surprised by the question. “Your sister never told you that we talked to her?”

“Talked to her about what?”

A shadow passed over Petrie’s face. “Your father, how he died.”

“I was there when he died,” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t in the room,” Petrie said. “Not when he died. Diana told me that.”

I recalled the long walk I’d taken in the cold drizzle of that morning. It had lasted perhaps twenty minutes, no more. But in that interval, the Old Man had passed away, his eyes still open when I returned to his room.

“No, I wasn’t with him,” I said.

“Diana told me that you were upset,” Petrie added. “That your last meeting with your father hadn’t gone well.”

“It sounds like you questioned Diana pretty thoroughly,” I said. “Why? My father was an old man. He’d been sick a long time.”

“Mentally sick.”

“That’s right.”

“But otherwise, quite healthy.”

“People his age die suddenly all the time,” I said.

“Yes, they do.”

“So you must have had other reasons,” I said. “For suspicion.”

Petrie nodded. “There were ligature marks on your father’s wrists and ankles. That’s why the coroner called me that day.”

I stared at him, shocked. “Ligature marks?” I repeated.

“They were very faint,” Petrie said. “And so the coroner didn’t necessarily suspect anything. He just had a few questions, more or less mandatory. So we checked a few things out, looked into the past, talked to a few people.”

“About Diana?”

“And about you,” Petrie answered. “We learned that you weren’t close to your father. In fact, you’d been estranged for quite some time.”

“He was disappointed in me,” I said. “He had some vision of me being a great intellect.” I shrugged. “But I’m not.” I stared at him evenly. “If you thought there was something suspicious about my father’s death, why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

“As a matter of fact, I intended to,” Petrie said. “I came over to your father’s house to do just that. You weren’t there, but Diana was. So I talked to her, and she explained everything.”

And so he’d never questioned me about my father’s death. He’d questioned only Diana, and in all her answers, she’d been quite convincing, he told me. As for the ligature marks, they were from the straps the hospital had used to restrain the Old Man while at Brigham, she’d told Petrie, restrained because he could not control himself, no longer knew what he was doing.

“We checked with Brigham, and it was true,” Petrie said. “They’d strapped him down several times before your sister checked him out of the hospital and took him home.”

“And that was enough for you to decide that you didn’t need to talk to me?”

“Yes, it was,” Petrie said. “There was no reason to look any further. We knew that there was no insurance to speak of. No big inheritance. And by all accounts your sister was devoted to your father. So we filed a report, and that was the end of it.” He smiled quietly. “No evidence for suspicion, I mean.”

“That my father had been murdered?”

Petrie nodded. “Murdered,” he said. “Yes.”

Without willing it, I returned to my father’s room, saw him again with his eyes open, mouth agape, Diana collecting things for the pyre, a robe, old shoes, my decision to go along with it, helping her do it now, reaching, as I had at that moment, for a dark green pillow, and finding a touch of unexpected moisture so that I’d looked up to see my father’s watery lips, and at that moment heard his voice on the phone, rousing me from sleep the night before, murmuring, Help me, help me, before Diana had taken the receiver from him, her voice typically persuasive, Go back to sleep, Davey, all is well.

Petrie’s gaze drifts down toward the cup.

“Suspicion is a shifting shade,” you tell him.

He lowers the cup to the table and slides it to the right. “Your father’s death, the things I told you about it when you came to my office, is that where it began?”

He means my journey, one you now imagine as a winding road through a green cemetery. One stone. Two. Three. Four? The first death returns to you, the Old Man’s midnight plea, Help me.

“He called me,” you tell Petrie. “The night before he died.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to help him. Diana took the receiver. She said everything was fine, that I should go back to sleep. So that’s what I did”

“And that was the last of it?”

“No, that wasn’t the last of it.”

You see the papers in Diana’s hand, pages and pages stapled together. You are standing with her in the Old Man’s study, clearing out his things. She lifts the papers toward you. This is why he called you that night, Davey. You take the papers from her, the horrible paranoid enemies list the Old Man has compiled through the years. Diana speaks again, Look at the last page. You flip to it obediently, Diana watching you closely. Look at the last name, Davey. Your eyes drift down the list: Jacob Stern, professor, plagiarist; Margaret Picard, reviewer, dilettante; Laslo Kapowski, editor, sycophant, until you reach the final name the Old Man had written in his familiar tortured scrawl. Diana Sears, daughter, cunt.

“He broke her heart,” you say quietly. “He called her terrible names.”

You are with her again, both of you in the study. You feel her draw the list from your fingers. Her voice sounds in your mind. It’s all right, Davey, he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Those last days must have been terrible for her,” you say now. “And I wasn’t there to help her. I stayed away until the very end.”

A phone rings in memory. You are at home, watching Gaslight, the original version. How easy it is, you are thinking, to convince a woman that she is insane.

“Diana called me,” you tell Petrie. “She said my father was very weak. She wanted me to come over. She was hoping we could reconcile before it was too late.”

You remember her words distinctly now, how emphatic and strangely certain Diana had seemed that there would be no later opportunity.

“And so I went over that morning,” you tell Petrie. “To the old house on Victor Hugo Street.”

You describe Diana leading you past the stairs and down the corridor, to where the Old Man sat in the high-backed chair.

“He was typing a letter when I came into the room,” you tell Petrie. “He didn’t look up when Diana told him I was there.”

You stop because it is difficult to tell the rest. You compose yourself, regain control. “Finally he lifted his head and gazed at me directly. He said, ‘You are dust to me. ’”

You recall Diana’s touch on your arm, directing you out of the room and back down the corridor.

“Diana told me to go for a walk, to come back later. So I did.”

Petrie nods softly. “Yes, a couple of neighbors saw you walking,” he tells you.

You feel a cold rain spitting in your face as you trudge up and down Victor Hugo Street, counting the minutes until ten have past.

“When I got back to the house, she was reciting to him,” you tell Petrie.

Her voice is a whisper in your mind.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a crystal sea.

“Coleridge,” you murmur quietly now, your gaze on the window, where a shower of autumn leaves floats toward the ground, shifting as they fall, dipping left and right as if trying to take wing, or at least slow their inevitable descent.

“He was already dead,” you add softly.

Then, to your surprise, there in the stripped-down interrogation room, you begin to recite. It isn’t Coleridge, or anyone remotely like him.

Memory is stigma,
Stain,
Enigma.

You smile joylessly, ironically, then, a boy still under the Old Man’s stern, oppressive sway, obediently give the required citation. “Kinsetta Tabu. ‘Cheddar Man. ’”

Petrie looks at you oddly, as if you have slipped behind some invisible curtain, into a separate world from which he must draw you back or into which he must follow.

“Dave,” he says, his voice clearly strained, like someone reaching for a drowning man, offering his hand, yet fearful of being pulled in. “Dave.”

His voice jerks you back to the room, the fading light beyond the window, the dire present. “Yes?”

“What were you thinking?”

“About Diana.”

“What about her?”

“That there is no net,” you tell him, “and that we are always falling.”

“Yes,” Petrie says very softly.

You see that he believes it, and that this dark recognition has chipped away at his stony professionalism. Still, you know that he has no choice but follow the descent until it reaches rock bottom.

There is more to tell.

And so you do.